Welcome to Things we read this week, a weekly post featuring articles from around the internet recommended by BMJ’s Digital Group members. These are articles we’ve read and liked, things that made us think and things we couldn’t stop talking about.

Journal coverage of the Emerging Sources Citation Index
A study looking at the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) found that 19.3% of the ESCI journals are not covered by any other A&I databases. “This low coverage suggests that the selection criteria for ESCI journals are not consistent with the overall trend in the other classical citation indexes.” (Suggested by Henry Spilberg, Associate Publisher)

Welcome to Things we read this week, a weekly post featuring articles from around the internet recommended by BMJ’s Digital Group members. These are articles we’ve read and liked, things that made us think and things we couldn’t stop talking about.

preLights
The Company of Biologists have launched their new biology preprint highlighting service, Prelights. They are keen to say that it is a community service, supported by the Company. They have a board of ‘Prelighters’ who are early career researchers who will pick and summarise preprints, adding a filter to the vast, increasing swathe of preprint literature. They will accept individuals or groups/journal clubs as Prelighters.

An Experimental Platform for Scholarly Article Recommendation
“Though data quality issues mean few strong conclusions can be drawn, we did see evidence that the co-download algorithm results in a significantly higher click through rate (3.94%) over either of the EigenFactor algorithms (0.95% and 0.86%). It is, however, unclear why co-download performed nearly three times better, and this will be an area for future investigation.”

RA21
Interesting backwards and forwards on Twitter about RA21 but with very little input from students and researchers about their thoughts. Is there a bit of a cultural divide here? In the UK aren’t (most?) students/academics already using this kind of system to access essential admin, course and library materials with data shared and tracked across multiple systems?

And finally, just because it’s Easter, inside the Cadbury Easter Egg factory in Bournville:

Sharon is the CDO at the British Medical Journal, the print publishing arm of the British Medical Association. Previously she held the title of CTO, but she doesn’t have a software/engineering background. We chat about her challenge to digitise the organisation, and how DevOps is making the BMJ safer!

BMJ Open has just published our study looking at the proportion of studies reporting patient and public involvement (PPI) before and after The BMJ‘s mandatory requirement to do this for all research articles: http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/8/3/e020452

Two MiRoR research fellows, Van Nguyen Thu (University Paris Descartes, France) and Ketevan Glonti (University of Split, Croatia) had the opportunity to interview Trish Groves, Director of Academic Outreach and Advocacy for BMJ, Editor in Chief of the online journal BMJ Open, and Honorary Deputy Editor of The BMJ.

Open peer review, data sharing, research misconduct, journal impact factors, patient involvement, are among the topics covered in this inspiring interview.